YIMBOs in disarray.
You need data centers to run services. Not every single one of them will be used for AI. Most Lemmy instances are hosted in a VPS in a data center. You can’t put a moratorium on AI construction without impacting other types of data centers since they are the same type of building
The type of datacenters running lemmy and other services are nothing like the AI datacenters being built. Some of the AI datacenters are literally 1000x bigger in terms of power consumption than existing data center buildings are using. They’re trying to build a 10 Gigawatt AI datacenter in Ohio, and it will need its own power station to run it.
I own my server and colocate it, and it’s sitting in what looks like a normal office building. You would never know from the sidewalk directly outside that there’s a hub for AWS and Google Cloud right there. The amount of cooling required is small enough they can just use regular air conditioning units on the roof, and none of this evaporating water crap.
I run my VPS from AWS and it’s in one of those huge data centers, so it just depends on what service you’re using
Unless you’re renting a GPU instance, I highly doubt your VPS is in one of these 1GW AI facilities, they’re mostly used privately by companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, or other companies specifically renting AI training capacity.
AWS has had existing datacenters for decades now and while they’re quite large, they’re a fraction of the size the AI industry is demanding. They were also built before regulations started getting changed in favor of more datacenters, so they’re actually following the zoning rules about noise, water, and power consumption.
I’ve rented one before, but it’s too expensive now. Technically, since I ran Katago on it you might consider it AI
The reason they‘ve been constructing data centers this huge, so many of them and so rapidly is AI and they‘ve been building them way too close to residential districts in many cases.
I challenge you to give me one good reason why we need these super data centers in our lives that outweigh the cons. They put our health at risk. Let alone the insane climate damage from all these gas turbines running 24/7. There is nothing on the internet you couldn‘t do anymore without them. Quite the opposite. The construction of more and bigger data centers is vastly accelerating enshittification of all services. You certainly don‘t need super data centers near cities to host Lemmy.
I mean have you seen the electricity bills in some places? They‘re literally running out of power, water and money so you can generate slop of dogs riding tricycles. There‘s a physical limit of how many of those slop factories you can physically support and Florida has seemingly reached it‘s limit.
They bring in lots of revenue, and the climate change is not an issue if we build more solar with energy storage. Texas is showing everyone it can be done.
Data centers need to be close to cities to have low latency to provide services. Even things like translation needs AI and if it’s immediate it makes conversations between people who speak different languages faster. I talk to a guy who only knows Spanish and he uses AI to translate sometimes when his daughter is not available.
Let’s not pretend the old way of translation with dictionary lookups and stuff actually worked
Actually fuck revenue tho.
You want cities to be broke?
